1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to industrial vehicle automation and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing accurate localization for an industrial vehicle.
2. Description of the Related Art
Entities regularly operate numerous facilities in order to meet supply and/or demand goals. For example, small to large corporations, government organizations and/or the like employ a variety of logistics management and inventory management paradigms to move objects (e.g., raw materials, goods, machines and/or the like) into a variety of physical environments (e.g., warehouses, cold rooms, factories, plants, stores and/or the like). A multinational company may build warehouses in one country to store raw materials for manufacture into goods, which are housed in a warehouse in another country for distribution into local retail markets. The warehouses must be well-organized in order to maintain and/or improve production and sales. If raw materials are not transported to the factory at an optimal rate, fewer goods are manufactured. As a result, revenue is not generated for the unmanufactured goods to counterbalance the costs of the raw materials.
Unfortunately, physical environments, such as warehouses, have several limitations that prevent timely completion of various tasks. Warehouses and other shared use spaces, for instance, must be safe for a human work force. Some employees operate heavy machinery and industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, which have the potential to cause severe or deadly injury. Nonetheless, human beings are required to use the industrial vehicles to complete tasks, which include object handling tasks, such as moving pallets of goods to different locations within a warehouse. Most warehouses employ a large number of forklift drivers and forklifts to move objects. In order to increase productivity, these warehouses simply add more forklifts and forklift drivers.
In order to mitigate the aforementioned problems, some warehouses utilize equipment for automating these tasks. As an example, these warehouses may employ automated industrial vehicles, such as forklifts, to carry objects on paths. When automating an industrial vehicle a key requirement is the ability to accurately locate the vehicle in the warehouse; to achieve this, a plurality of sensors are frequently used to determine the vehicle position (x, y location and orientation) within the physical environment. One solution uses a rotating laser or fixed camera to measure the distance to specific, defined or coded markers. However, this approach has the drawback of requiring detailed environment surveying to measure the global location of the defined or coded markers, which increases the overall system deployment time and cost. Another solution uses three-dimensional sensors, such as from three-dimensional lasers and/or cameras, to localize an industrial vehicle. This approach, however, requires complex computations, which are increased through the use of larger information sets and, where reference maps are required, there is significant cost and time involved in creating and verifying the correctness.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for providing accurate localization by using two-dimensional (planar) sensing on an industrial vehicle.